The Cornish paradox: ethnoregionalism in a hybrid territory

ABSTRACT: This article addresses a gap in the literature on nationalism, the case of
Cornwall. Cornish ethnoregionalism presents a paradox; a minority nationalist
movement that has sustained itself politically for more than a half a century, culturally
for more than century, yet one that has achieved little electoral or policy success. It is
argued here that Cornwall has been conceptualised hitherto too rigidly within one of
two paradigms – as a Celtic country or as an English county. Instead, recognising this
hybridity allows us to extend Lieven De Winter’s work on European ethnoregionalist
parties to explain both the weakness of Cornish ethnoregionalism and its persistence,
albeit at relatively low levels of activity. By investigating the Cornish case theory on
ethnoregionalist parties is applied comparatively, leading to the conclusion that
utilising a number of perspectives at differing scales opens out our understanding of
concrete cases of minority nationalism.

Introduction

More than two decades ago Hechter and Levi pondered why, ‘in an area of Celtic
nationalism in the British Isles there should be so much of a Welsh problem yet so
little of a Cornish one’ (Hechter and Levi 1979: 262). However, despite a flowering of
scholarship on ethnoregional movements, there has been sparse academic discussion
of the Cornish case since Hechter and Levi wrote these words. This is perhaps
understandable if we were to accept the view of Gibbon (1993: 64) that, while the
Welsh and Bretons remain distinct groups ‘others such as the Cornish have
disappeared’. This neatly solves Hechter and Levi’s dilemma. If there is no such
identifiable cultural group as the Cornish then there can be no nationalism based on
that group. But things are not quite so simple. Although Cornwall and Cornish
nationalism experiences a ‘categorization problem’, occupying diverse and in some
ways contradictory conceptual spaces, a Cornish nationalist movement exists. This
movement has contained most of the features commonly associated with European
minority nationalist movements (Deacon et al 2003). Nevertheless, it has failed to
achieve either electoral or policy success. This article addresses this paradoxical case
– a sustained ethnoregional movement which has attained only intermittent visibility.

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Through investigating this forgotten case we are able to respond to calls to test
general theory on nationalism against individual accounts by constructing
theoretically informed comparative histories (Halliday in Özkirimli 2000: 233). And
to do this we now possess a far better set of conceptual tools than were available to
Hechter and Levi. General theories of nationalism, whether ‘primordialist’,
‘modernist’ or ‘constructivist’, have now attained a sophisticated level (Özkirimli
2000). But, operating at a relatively abstract level, these offer only modest
explanatory power if we seek to explain the details of specific ethnoregionalist
movements (Lecours 2000). In contrast, the detailed body of work on ethoregional
political parties brought together by De Winter and Tursan (1998) makes use of more
intermediate variables, focussing on ethnoregional political parties as agents of ethnic
mobilisation. This adopts an opportunity structure approach, explaining their relative
success or failure in terms of a capacity to accumulate political resources.

After establishing its relative strength, this article applies De Winter and Tursan’s
opportunity structure framework to Cornish nationalism, allowing us to establish
some possible reasons for lack of success. The analysis then broadens out from this
theoretical base, introducing other perspectives before concluding that, in order to
understand a specific case of ethnoregionalism, a combination of approaches at
different scales of explanation are required. Indeed, the narrower the case study the
more essential it is to provide a wider analytical frame. But first we must explain the
conceptual confusion that surrounds Cornwall. This article thus begins by identifying
the ways that Cornwall and Cornish nationalism has been approached by academics.

Cornwall and Cornish nationalism

Hechter and Levi assumed that Cornish nationalism was part of a general ‘Celtic
nationalism’. This is one academic reading of Cornwall - Cornwall as a (Celtic)
nation. However, there is another - Cornwall as an (English) county. Hitherto,
Cornwall has tended to be read from one or other of these two perspectives. This
bifocal perspective helps to explain the bewildering variety of conclusions about this
regional nationalism. In contrast, the contention here is that the hybridity of

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Cornwall’s historical experience and its role in producing a case that is neither
unambiguously Celtic nor just an English county has been under-recognised. Only by
addressing this hybrid experience explicitly can we reach a better understanding of
this particular case.

Cornwall’s origins as a British kingdom and the presence of a widely spoken Celtic
language into the 18th century have brought it to the attention of historians. Echoing
primordialist views of nationalism there has been some discussion of a distinct
medieval and early modern ethnicity (Hasting 1997: 44; Robbins 1998: 8-9; Stoyle
2001). However, the decline of Cornish as a vernacular language is viewed as having
undermined the ethnic distinctiveness of its people. According to this reading,
separate ethnicity faded as Cornwall moved into the modern period, a process
accompanied by Cornwall’s re-branding as an English county. For Hechter, this early
folding ‘into the expanding Tudor … state [meant that] no concept of national self-
determination was readily available to help their elites mobilise peasant resistance’.
Yet minority nationalisms ‘came back to haunt both Britain and France’, being
adopted in territories like Wales and Brittany (Hechter 2000: 92). Cornwall’s history
had provided the resources for a similar adoption.

Ward-Perkins (2000: 521) claims that Cornwall ‘remains the one part of England
where not all indigenous inhabitants automatically describe themselves as “English”’.
But the word ‘remains’ is misleading. This may not be the lingering reminder of an
older relict identity. It could be the outcome of an ethnoregional identity renewed in
recent times. Both Eric Hobsbawm and Tom Nairn raise this possibility. Hobsbawm,
contrasting Cornwall with the north of England, has remarked that ‘the Cornish are
fortunate to be able to paint their regional discontents in the attractive colours of
Celtic tradition, which makes them so much more viable’ (Hobsbawm 1992: 178).
Meanwhile, according to Nairn, ‘the sole other alternative [to regionalism in England]
would be the Cornish case – claiming or coining national credentials in order to
underwrite equal status’ (Nairn 2000: 187). Nairn argues that Cornish nationalism was
‘simply ignored by traditional all-British political reflection – too insignificant to
figure, as it were, in its dazzling image of greatness and global reach’ (Nairn 2000:
14).

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Cornwall as a (Celtic) nation may have exerted an occasional attraction on historians
(see also Vernon 1998) but, simultaneously, its administrative status renders its
nationalist movement indistinct, invisible, even inconvenient, to many social
scientists. The more common paradigm here is Cornwall as (English) county. Thus
Alan Butt Philip sees Cornish identity as an example of a ‘local’ identity, ‘typically to
be found in counties such as Somerset, Cornwall or Durham, which reflect
administrative (and socio-cultural) divisions which go back 1,000 years (Butt Philip
1999: 35). The insistence that Cornwall is merely a ‘county’ identity undercuts the
space available for conceptualising its ethnoregionalist movement. Consequently, the
actual existence of a political movement calling for devolution, or of an identity that
might insist on defining itself as more than a county identity, is rarely addressed from
this perspective. Cornwall becomes an ‘inconvenient periphery’ (Payton 2002) or
even an embarrassing periphery as claims for the existence of a Cornish national
identity are vigorously rejected. Thus Crick has written: ‘once I read “Cornish” [in the
nationality column of a hotel register] but I suspected, correctly, that it was a wag and
not a nut’ (Crick 1989: 23). Such comforting assumptions indicate that Cornwall
occupies an intriguing and difficult conceptual space.

References to Cornwall in the footnotes of the literature on nationalism and

regionalism often owe more to dominant assumptions about territory, place and
‘Celticity’ than they do to the actual empirical details. In 1951 the organisation
Mebyon Kernow (MK) (Sons of Cornwall) was formed with a set of cultural demands
that included furthering the acceptance of the idea of the Cornwall as one of the six
Celtic nations. From 1951 to the mid-1960s MK remained a small cultural and
economic pressure group, with attempts to preserve and publicise the Cornish
language and other Cornish ‘traditions’ uppermost. This began to change in the mid-
1960s when it entered the electoral arena, first fighting local elections and then a
Parliamentary seat in 1970. By 1979 a relative high point of electoral intervention was
reached. Reflecting the fortunes of ethnoregionalist parties elsewhere, MK
experienced a decade of doubts and uncertainty about its direction in the 1980s. Like
Plaid Cymru it opted for a leftist position in this decade, a trajectory begun during the
1970s (Lynch 1995; McAllister 2001). In the 1990s electoral activity again increased
and the party settled down to a less troubled period when it concentrated on

4
electioneering. The transition to a political party was apparently complete (Deacon et
al 2003).

MK in comparative perspective

MK is only part of a wider ‘movement’ that includes a variety of cultural and political
pressure groups. But, here we concentrate on the support for political
ethnoregionalism in Cornwall by plotting the electoral performance of MK. Table 1
compares the results of MK with those of the SNP and Plaid Cymru at parliamentary
elections, the normal frame of analysis. It is immediately apparent that MK’s
performance is dismal, the party failing to score more than three per cent even at its
best election in 1979. It has also never managed to contest all five Cornish
constituencies. At this level MK is, for all intents and purposes, electorally invisible.
But there are other levels and other comparisons that can be made.

Table 1: Mean percentage vote of candidates at parliamentary elections

MK (number of Plaid Cymru SNP
candidates)
1970 2.0 (1) 11.5 11.4
1974 (Feb) 1.5 (1) 10.7 21.9
1974 (Oct) 0.7 (1) 10.8 30.4
1979 2.9 (3) 8.1 17.3
1983 1.2 (2) 7.8 11.8
1987 no candidates 7.3 14.0
1992 no candidates 9.0 21.5
1997 0.8 (4) 9.9 22.1
2001 2.1 (3) 14.3 20.1
Source: calculated from Deacon et al 2003; Henig and Baston 2002; Lynch 2002;
McAllister 2001.

‘Second-order’ elections such as those to the European Parliament are cited as

opportunities providing a political space for ethnoregionalist parties (De Winter and
Cachafeiro 2002). Indeed, the first such election was the occasion of one of MK’s

5
most successful results. In 1979, its candidate, Richard Jenkin, won six per cent of the
vote. But MK fought this election on boundaries that included three non-Cornish
parliamentary constituencies. Allowing for this, the MK vote equated to 9.5 per cent,
not that far behind the Plaid Cymru score of 11.7 per cent in Wales. But 1979 was to
prove a false dawn for Cornish nationalism. In stark contrast to Scotland and Wales,
at the Euro-elections in both 1989 and 1994 MK’s support reverted to a very low
level.

Table 2: Mean percentage vote of candidates at European elections

MK (adjusted for Plaid Cymru SNP
non-Cornish
constituencies)
1979 9.5 11.7 19.4
1984 1.6 (Cornish 12.2 17.8
Nationalist Party
candidate)
1989 3.0 12.9 25.6
1994 2.1 17.1 32.6
1999 no candidate 29.6 27.2
Source: as Table 1

Logically, ethnoregional identities are more likely to be expressed in regional

elections (Hamann 1999) and the elections to the devolved Scottish Parliament and
Welsh Assembly would seem to bear this out. Cornwall has no similar democratically
elected body, but there is a local government body, Cornwall County Council, that
matches its territory. MK candidates have appeared at this level since 1967, although
the party has never been able to contest more than a quarter of the available seats.
However, the number of candidates does reflect the widely observed two ‘waves’ of
ethnoregionalist electoral activity (Letamendia 1997), declining in the late 1980s and
re-emerging during the 1990s. In terms of votes won, the party does considerably
better at this level, succeeding in electing one councillor in each election from 1985 to
1997. But local government elections in Cornwall are not fully party-politicised. The
mean vote of MK candidates is therefore inflated by those instances where it is not

6
opposed by Labour or the Liberal Democrats. If we ignore straight fights with
Conservatives or Independents and isolate those contests with at least two opponents
the MK vote is as shown in Table 3.

Table 3: Number of MK candidates and mean percentage vote in contests with at least
three candidates, Cornwall County Council elections
candidates Mean vote in contests with
three or more candidates (N)
1977 7 14.8 (5)
1981 14 (including 5 CNP) 13.8 (12)
1985 5 (including 2 CNP) 10.5 (3)
1989 3 12.7 (2)
1993 7 8.5 (4)
1997 13 10.1 (11)
2001 21 12.1 (21)

At this level there is clearly more support. Although, in a first past the post system,
this is insufficient to gain councillors, under a proportional voting system MK would
be consistently represented at the local government level. Overall therefore, when
compared with the SNP or Plaid Cymru, MK has performed very poorly in the
electoral arena, failing to achieve a breakthrough. Nevertheless, it has maintained a
sustained though not comprehensive, presence at elections at all levels and its voting
support is comparable with most fourth party interventions in England. While
admitting it is ‘a long way from being the equivalent of the SNP or Plaid Cymru’,
Henig and Baston (2002: 50) conclude that ‘it is a serious and committed presence on
the Cornish scene with potential for growth’.

Moreover, another comparison can be made. Breton nationalism has received

considerably more academic attention than that of Cornwall. In the 1970s accounts
tended to treat Breton nationalism as if it were equivalent to that of Scotland, Wales,
the Basque Country or Catalonia (Reece 1977). This gave way in the 1980s to a more
critical perspective (Keating 1985; Rogers 1990). Nevertheless, overly simplistic

7
summaries of Breton nationalism can still be encountered, for example in the
assertion of ‘growing levels of popular support for nationalism in Brittany, Quebec,
Scotland and Wales, among other regions, from the 1960s onwards’ (Thompson and
Fevre 2001: 310). In electoral terms at least this overestimates the support received by
Breton nationalism.

In 1963 the Union Democratique Bretonne (UDB) was formed and quickly became
the principal Breton ethnoregionalist political organisation, gaining municipal
councillors in 1977 as part of a Union of the Left. At the same time it began to contest
elections to the French Legislative Assembly. Although a more explicitly socialist
party from its inception, the UDB’s move into electoral politics closely paralleled
MK. Indeed, the more radical wing of MK had considerable contact with the UDB in
the later 1970s and early 1980s. In the 1980s, however, the UDB found it increasingly
difficult to carve out a space for itself as its former Socialist Party allies took over the
reins of government. The UDB discovered that it was unable to influence government
policy and yet also incapable of emerging as a credible political force. Its membership
fell from over 2,000 at its height in the late 1970s to 800 by 1983 (Rogers 1990). Like
MK, the 1980s was a difficult decade for the UDB and strategy shifted as the party
made overtures to ecologists, cultural activists and others. While the UDB faced more
rivals as the Breton movement began to fragment, like MK it survived the 1980s and
continues to be the most active electoral component of the Breton ethnoregionalist
movement.

If we compare the votes gained at state-wide elections by the UDB with those of MK
a very similar picture emerges.

Table 4: Mean votes and number of candidates at parliamentary elections

Year MK Year UDB and allies
1970 2.0 (1)
1974 (Feb) 1.5 (1) 1973 2.2 (5)
1974 (Oct) 0.7 (1)
1979 2.9 (3) 1978 1.9 (17)
1983 1.2 (2) 1981 2.2 (16)

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1987 no candidates 1986 and 1988 no candidates
1992 no candidates 1993 no candidates
1997 0.8 (4) 1997 2.0 (24)
2001 2.1 (3) 2002 1.5 (36)

In addition, although there have been regional elections in France since 1986, so far
the UDB and its allies have been unable to surmount the five per cent bar necessary to
gain seats. In cantonal elections, the most directly comparable with County Council
elections in Cornwall, 53 Breton regionalist candidates in 2001 (contesting around 40
per cent of the available seats) won a mean 4.6 per cent of the vote, no improvement
on the 5.6 per cent mean vote of its 34 candidates at the height of the first wave of
ethno-regionalism in 1979 (Loughlin 1985).

Such levels of electoral support are the same or lower than those achieved by MK.
Proportions of the total vote might not, however, be the most appropriate comparative
measure. Gordin proposes an Index of Electoral Success (IES), which compares the
votes won by ethnoregionalist parties with the votes obtained by the leading party in
the region. For Gordin this has the advantage of yielding ‘a comparative measure at
the cross-national level, which is independent of the number of contenders and
population size’ (Gordin 2001: 156). Applying this measure to recent elections in
Cornwall, Brittany, Wales and Scotland, we see in Table 5 that both the UDB and
MK’s IES at parliamentary level is very weak, when compared with that of Plaid
Cymru and the SNP. At local government level, however, the IES for MK is
considerably higher than that of the UDB.

Table 5: Index of Electoral Success

Parliamentary elections Pmt//Assembly/ Local elections
regjonal
elections
1997 2001 1998/99 2001
MK 0.02 0.05 0.32
UDB 0.05 0.03 0.09 0.12

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PC 0.18 0.29 0.86
SNP 0.48 0.45 0.81

We can now revisit Hechter and Levi’s implied question. From the perspective of
Cornwall as a (Celtic) nation the weak performance of MK when compared with Plaid
Cymru and the SNP reinforces the view that Cornish regional nationalism has failed.
MK remains confined to the margins of electoral visibility, unable to achieve a total
coverage in terms of its electoral interventions. Thus, from this perspective we need to
explain that relative failure. However, the example of another ‘Celtic’ case study, that
of Brittany, suggests that such failure is not limited to the Cornish ethnoregionalist
movement. On the other hand, from a perspective of Cornwall as an (English) county,
the very existence of Cornish ethnoregionalism should be a puzzling anomaly. Its
persistence over the past half-century is itself a phenomenon that requires explanation,
as no county or region of England has given rise to anything similar.

The opportunity structure of Cornish nationalism: external determinants

For De Winter and Tursan (1998) the ability of ethnoregionalist parties to mobilise
and to succeed depends, on a series of external and internal determinants making up
their ‘opportunity structure’. Foremost among the five proposed external determinants
is the relative strength of the regional identity. Hearl et al (1996) have argued that the
most important factor in explaining the success of regional nationalism is the presence
of a widely spoken regional language. However, the relative success of the SNP and
the Lega Nord casts doubt on this. For De Winter and Tursan (1998: 216-17)
language is instead part of a general feeling of belonging. It is this broader level of
regional identification that correlates with levels of voting for an ethnoregionalist
party. In the case of MK, the most crucial determinant is often deemed to the
resources supplied by the cultural identity. There has been a tendency to repeat the
assertion that Cornwall is a region with a ‘rather weak sense of identity’ (Guiberneau
2001: 17). Others go further. For Shaw (1991: 226) there is ‘no distinctive Cornish
identity’, the ‘original’ Cornish identity having been undermined. But it is not clear
what evidence these assertions are based on.

10
There is a circular argument here. The weakness of the ethnoregionalist party, which
‘oscillates around the threshold of political visibility’ (Stanyer 1997) is taken to prove
the weakness of cultural identity. In turn, a weak ethnoregional party cannot mobilise
the ethnoregional identity. However, the view that the weakness of Cornish
ethnnoregionalism is a simple function of the ‘weakness’ of its identity has a number
of problems. First, actual survey data on the strength of identity in Cornwall is
lacking, although there are some indications that the sense of belonging to Cornwall
as a territory is notably stronger than the norm for administrative counties in England
(MORI 1994; MORI 2003). Second, the work on nationalism would suggest that
identities are malleable, fluid and provisional (Thompson and Day 1999: 39).
Identities can change and identities are made. Permanent and continuing ‘weakness’
can therefore never be taken for granted. Finally, the assumption that there is a simple
link between the strength of identity and ethnoregional party support may not be so
clear-cut. Here, the Breton comparison is instructive. As we have seen, the Breton
ethnoregionalist movement is, in terms of its electoral support, no stronger than the
Cornish. Yet most observers recognise a distinctive Breton identity, involving a
‘powerful sense of attachment to a physical territory and its looks, as well as a sense
of sharing, however, diffusely, in a way of life’ (Timm ????:119; Le Coadic 1998). As
in Brittany, a distinctive, if subtle and diffuse sense of Cornish ‘difference’ may exist
yet not give rise to an electorally successful ethnoregionalist party.

Other external resources clearly have a part to play in the relative failure of Cornish
nationalism. In the Cornish case the electoral system seems to be an obvious
constraint. Unlike the SNP and Plaid Cymru, MK did not succeed in breaking through
in the crucial decades of the 1960s and 1970s. When, during the 1980s and 1990s, the
main parties expanded their interventions in local elections and other competitor
parties arrived, difficulties were compounded. Yet the other three ‘external’ resources
noted by De Winter – demonstration effects, Europeanization and critical events -
have not acted as obvious constraints. MK’s ‘oscillations’ strongly correlate with the
two waves of ethnoregionalist party activity. Its fortunes therefore benefit, albeit at a
low level, from demonstration effects. Similarly the process of European integration
provides another space for Cornish ethnoregionalism. European Objective 1 structural
funding in 1999 resulted in the re-drawing of the European regional map and the

11
recognition of Cornwall as a Level II European statistical region. This gave Cornwall
more visibility within Europe. From another institutional direction, the existence of
European Minority Rights and Minority Language Charters has opened up a new
arena for pressure group activity, focusing on the Council of Europe. In contrast, in
1999 the adoption of proportional representation in very large constituencies for Euro-
elections in the UK closed down that particular electoral space. Finally, critical events
remain an unpredictable resource, although they help to explain the timing of the
appearance of Cornish regional nationalism. In the mid-1960s proposals for large-
scale population transfers of Londoners to ‘overspill’ estates in Cornwall triggered a
growth in MK’s membership and its subsequent leap into electoral politics.

Other, external constraints may be identified if we look to what Gordin (2001) calls
‘additional context factors’. First, Giordiano (2001) has called attention to the link
between economically buoyant regions and ‘relatively strong regionalist political
parties’, using Flanders, Catalonia and northern Italy to illustrate his point. As
Cornwall’s qualification for EU Objective 1 grant aid implies, its economy has been
anything but buoyant, marked by under-unemployment and the lowest wages
anywhere in the UK. Yet, the Cornish paradox is that, in contrast to other ‘depressed’
areas, in-migration to Cornwall fuelled by ‘quality of life’ aspirations and a mass
tourist industry and facilitated by the house price differential between Cornwall and
the south east of England, has run at relatively high levels since the early 1960s. High
levels of in-migration, though credited with triggering a revival of ‘Cornishness’ as
people looked to what distinguished them in a period of rapid social change, have also
changed the demographic profile of Cornwall. By 2001 probably only around a half of
Cornish residents had been born or brought up in Cornwall, a situation similar to the
Isle of Man, where it has been claimed that immigration in the 1980s weakened Manx
cultural traditions and was a factor in a muted nationalist response (Prentice 1990).

However, political factors may be more relevant for explaining the political weakness
of Cornish ethnoregionalism. In the 1980s Studlar and McAllister (1988) asked
whether Liberal/Alliance and nationalist voters were part of a general Britain-wide
protest, on the basis that Scots and Welsh nationalist voters resembled those for the
Alliance. Other studies have noted the negative correlation of SNP and Liberal
Democrat voting support and the strong protest element in the SNP vote in the 1970s,

12
a protest vote that, in some circumstances, could also find a home with the Liberal
Democrats (Lutz 1990; Levy 1995). Arguing back to Cornwall from this evidence a
key factor constraining the growth of MK has been the presence of the Liberal
Democrats. Potential protest voters in Cornwall have always had the credible option
of the Liberals, even in the 1970s the clear alternative to the Conservatives in three of
the five Cornish constituencies. In the later 1960s, when MK still allowed dual
membership with other parties, Liberal MPs and other Liberal activists were
prominent members. Indeed, in 1968 Liberal Constituency Associations were reported
to be ‘investigating the political and economic implications of independence’ and
considering a bill demanding independence for Cornwall (Tregidga 2000). Liberal
Democrats in Cornwall continued to play a local card in the 1980s and 1990s,
appealing to a ‘fair deal for Cornwall’ in their electoral rhetoric. The anti-
metropolitanism of the Liberal Democrats both obscured the distinction between it
and MK and attracted those voters who wanted a credible chance of electing an MP. It
also means that in Cornwall MK has always found it difficult to retain activists
ambitious for office. The Liberal Democrats offer a potential home for such people,
the most prominent recent example being Andrew George, MP for St.Ives.
Ethnoregionalist party relationships with ‘mainstream’ parties also explain the
difficulties of the UDB in Brittany in the 1980s. Here, a regionalist orientated
Socialist Party played a role similar to that of the Liberal Democrats in Cornwall,
siphoning off potential nationalist voters and UDB activists (Keating 1985).

Internal determinants

External opportunities require internal resources in order to be translated from

potential facilitating factors to agents of success. Regional elites and ethnoregional
leaders wed symbols of group solidarity to issues of redistributive justice or self-
determination (O’Sullivan See 1986: 32). Here, the internal resources of ethno-
regionalism become more crucial. These include leadership resources, party
organisation, voters, strategy and media and links to broader regional networks.
Leadership resources are viewed as a crucial factor; De Winter notes the role of
charismatic personalities such as Jorde Pujol in Catalonia, Umberto Bossi in Northern
Italy and Gwynfor Evans in Wales, who played a crucial role on sustaining and

13
publicising their parties (De Winter and Tursan 1998: 222). MK has produced no
leader of the same stature. Significantly, while the leadership of the SNP has included
a number of private sector professionals (Lynch 2002: 4), this group has not been
present in MK. In contrast four of the eight MK leaders since the mid-1960s have
been teachers and lecturers, and the core activists are more likely to come from lower
levels of public sector employment.

The second internal determinant is the strength of party organisation. De Winter

(1998: 226) observes that the relationship between electoral success and ethnoregional
party membership is actually very weak but that many such parties are vulnerable to
factionalism. The ability of the party organisation to contain such factionalism thus
becomes an important resource. MK’s party organisation has never been able to
support a persistent organisational presence in all Cornwall’s urban areas or raise the
money necessary either to fight large-scale election campaigns or to employ full-time
organisers. The result is a shifting geography of activity, as electoral interventions and
branch presence fluctuates depending on the variable energy of voluntary activists. In
this respect MK remains stuck at an organisational level reminiscent of the SNP in the
1950s (Lynch 2002: 64-91). Nevertheless, MK has avoided a great deal of damaging
factionalism.

In Catalonia Moreno et al (1998) discovered that expressions of Catalan identity

positively correlate with higher social class and De Winter proposes that a further
internal determinant is the potential voting support for the ethnoregionalist party. If
the success of an ethnoregionalist party depends on the presence of younger, well
educated voters attracted to post-materialist values, as much of the literature suggests,
then this is one internal resource relatively less available in Cornwall. The absence of
a university in Cornwall has led to a pattern of net out-migration of better qualified
school-leavers. In addition, a paucity of professional jobs plus the competition
produced by a large counter-urbanisation stream of middle aged and well qualified in-
migrants mean that it is extremely difficult for those who leave for higher education to
obtain work in Cornwall (Perry et al 1986).

Another internal resource available to ethnoregionalist parties is that of strategy and

media. Newman (1996: 10) introduces a typology of ethnoregional ideologies,

14
depending on the socio-economic groups to whom appeal is made. In the 1960s the
party adopted a formally ‘classless-inclusive approach’, appealing simultaneously to
all social groups. However, in practice this has often looked more like a ‘selective-
protective’ ideology, laying greater emphasis on the interests of groups suffering most
from modernisation, such as the declining mining and quarrying industry, fishermen
and small farmers. MK’s electoral appeal has not been enhanced by its failure to
engage with a ‘selective-developmental’ ideology, appealing to thriving new
occupational sectors. But there remains a problem of transmitting the message to
these sectors. One internal resource that MK clearly lacks is media coverage. No print
medium matches the territory of Cornwall. The local daily press - the Western
Morning News - is printed outside Cornwall and covers Devon and parts of Somerset
and Dorset as well as Cornwall. Meanwhile, the weekly press fragments Cornwall
into a series of market areas, feeding a parochialism induced by a dispersed settlement
structure. Conversely, although there is a BBC local radio station, the all-important
television channels are based on a geographical template that includes Cornwall
within a much larger market.

De Winter’s final internal determining factor is the ability of the regional party to link
into broader regional networks (see also Newman 1994). Initially, MK grew out of a
wider Cornish cultural revivalist movement. While its base in this social movement
helped to guarantee a certain longevity, the Cornish revival remained for most of the
twentieth century a small sub-culture within Cornwall. Its bardic trappings and Celtic
borrowings, including a Cornish kilt, were regarded as somewhat esoteric by much of
Cornish society, and the connection to Cornwall’s historic identity, shaped more by
rural industrialisation associated with mining, by nonconformity and emigration, was
always a tentative one. However, to some extent, cultural change in Cornwall since
the 1980s has blended the icons of the Cornish revival with other practices, such as
music and sport, thus partly integrating the revivalist sub-culture into popular culture.
At the same time MK’s links with cultural revivalism have loosened, although it has
not embedded itself in other regional networks. This introduces a crucial institutional
constraint facing Cornish ethnoregionalism.

15
Institutions

Lecours (2000) has called for the explicit employment of historical institutionalism in
isolating a political opportunity structure outside the social movements under
investigation. This, he claims, helps explain the timing and intensity of ethno-
regionalist movements, which are ‘heavily dependent upon their institutional
environment’ (Lecours 2000: 12). Structural opportunities then combine with
‘movement entrepreneurs’ who connect the identity with situations and events defined
as unjust. To an extent Lecours’ approach overlaps with De Winter’s external and
internal resources. But it opens out the political opportunity approach so that it
becomes more sensitive to the institutional context outside the political sphere and to
the broader role of elites in the region, and not merely those leading the
ethnoregionalist movement.

By alerting us to the context of wider institutions and elites, Lecours’ approach

isolates important factors in the weakness of Cornish ethnoregionalism. Adopting the
concept of ‘institutional thickness’ (Storper 1997) Giordiano has argued that ‘a
political regionalist project can gain much greater legitimacy and importance if it is
able to embed itself among dominant local and regional, economic and civic
institutions’ (Giordiano, 2001). However, Cornwall since the 1960s has been subject
to a process of de-institutionalisation, as both public and private sector institutions
formerly organised on a Cornish territorial basis have been merged into wider
administrative organisations based on either Devon and Cornwall or on the
Government’s seven county planning region of the South West. Such re-
centralisation has opened up an institutional vacuum in Cornwall. Thus, there are
precious few Cornish institutions left in which an ethnoregionalist movement might
embed itself.

Re-centralisation and the flight of institutional headquarters and decision making

eastwards also helps to produce a weak civil society in Cornwall. There are now very
few non-governmental and quasi-governmental institutional bodies organised on a
Cornish territorial basis. This contrasts starkly with Scotland, where the pervasive
civil society generates a sense of unity and consensus (Hearn 2002). If we add the
absence of Cornish-based media or a university we have all the ingredients for an

16
‘institutionally-thin’ region, one which lacks the resources necessary for generating
strategic and critical debate about its economic and social direction. The absence of
such institutions means that decision-making becomes subject to a process of
fragmentation and competitive parochialism at the local level, whereas strategic
direction is removed upwards to peak ‘regional’ institutions. Local elites are then
pulled into a centralised level of decision-making and networks based on Bristol or
Exeter, over a hundred miles distant from Cornwall.

Focusing on the broader institutional and elite context Lecours’ approach has allowed
us to pinpoint further factors constraining Cornish ethnoregionalism. However, in
view of Cornwall’s peripheral location in wider institutional networks, we must shift
our focus both outwards onto institutions and networks based elsewhere – but at the
same time not lose sight of the cultural underpinnings of Cornish identity.

Categorizing Cornwall

Ethnic identities are categorized as the result of an ongoing interaction between

internal and external definitions (Jenkins 1994). In terms of the latter, wider structures
of governance, of power and authority relations are crucial. Here, broadening out
Lecours’ historical institutionalist approach to encompass the institutions of the new
regionalisation in the South West, we can identify a wider context that constrains
Cornwall’s ethnoregionalist movement. Institutions shape individual goals and
preferences. The construction of a bank of institutions based on a supra-Cornish
territorial scale structures both career paths and the perceived boundaries of the
possible for elite groups in Cornwall. The growth of such formal institutions also lock
into place ‘path-dependencies’ as they act as entrepreneurs for a certain definition of
regionalism. By defining one scale as ‘the region’, other lower scales of activity are,
perforce, ‘local’, with all the connotations of that term. Thus institutions are more
than constraining structures; they are ‘normative vessels’, carrying understandings
and establishing ways of doing things, and providing ‘cognitive scripts, categories and
models’ (Hall and Taylor 1996: 948).

17
The re-centralised institutions of the South West region therefore have considerable
implications for the choices and constraints that structure the Cornish ethnoregionalist
movement. Most important, they reinforce and reproduce a categorization of Cornwall
as ‘local’, one that leaves little space for an ethnoregionalist movement. The
consequent difficulties in bringing this inconvenient periphery to public attention
were neatly illustrated in the central government response to the Cornish
Constitutional Convention, a campaign that emerged in 2000 to demand an assembly
for Cornwall in the process of English regionalization (Sandford 2002). Despite
collecting 50,000 signatures in support of an assembly and encouraging more people
from Cornwall to respond to government consultation exercises than did from all
other regions combined (Western Morning News 17 October 2002) this campaign was
studiously ignored by the UK Government’s White Paper on Regional Government
(DTLR/Cabinet Office 2002). Moreover, the Government’s regional template acts to
reinforce the hybridity of local culture in Cornwall, confirming an ambiguous context
for Cornish nationalism.

People do not have a fixed, unshakeable identity. Instead, dual identities are
widespread. For example, in Spain a sense of self-ascribed local or ethno-territorial
identity co-exists with state identities produced by political integration and state-
building to produce a ‘compound nationality’ (Moreno et al 1998). Territorial
identities ‘nest’ along a hierarchy of scales and the salience of any one scale will vary
depending on the social context (Herb and Kaplan 1999). Such ‘nesting’ in Cornwall
is already perhaps more complex than elsewhere, even without the complication of a
South West region. In Cornwall there is the added scale of Englishness. Just as
Englishness has been expressed through Britishness (Wellings 2002), so has
Cornishness sometimes nested within Englishness. The very obviousness of
Englishness (Colls 2002: 2-3) also makes it an enigma (Kumar 2003: ix). As a
consequence ideas of Englishness in Cornwall – whether taken for granted in the
Cornwall as (English) county paradigm or hastily passed over in the Cornwall as
(Celtic) nation paradigm - have been even less researched than ideas of Cornishness.
Nevertheless, English imaginations are reproduced both by Cornwall’s contemporary
administrative and institutional status and by the presence of large number of
migrants, mainly from the south east of England, who bring their national imaginings
with them.

18
In France and Spain, the greatest regionalist success has been associated with
societies experiencing the most disruption and disintegration (Loughlin 1985;
Blinkhorn 1994). Brown (2000: 77) also argues that nationalism is generated by
‘diffuse feelings of insecurity and uncertainty’. But in Cornwall the ethnoregionalist
movement has competition when attempting to tap such uncertainty. An undertow of
English nationalism provides a potential alternative in the shape of the neo-populist
right, driven by feelings of insecurity which, in the UK, manifest themselves in such
things as fear of asylum seekers, racism, support for fox hunting and anti-
Europeanism. It may be no coincidence that the Referendum Party in 1997 achieved
some of its highest votes in Cornwall, while the United Kingdom Independence Party
and pro-hunting campaigns alike continue to receive the support of small but
vociferous minorities.

However, things are not quite as clear-cut as this suggests. The boundary between
Cornishness and Englishness is porous, with Englishness structuring Cornishness but
Cornishness also influencing Englishness. Just as in Brittany, the black and white
Breton flag – the Gwenn ha Du – is carried on virtually all demonstrations and public
rituals (Gemie 2001), it may be significant that in Cornwall the St.Piran’s flag now
appears a de rigueur accessory at demonstrations of all kinds. These extend from
those against war in Iraq through local campaigns to prevent hospital closures to
marches in London organised by the Countryside Alliance. Cornish flags, only a
decade or so ago confined almost solely to demonstrations in and around the Cornish
ethnoregionalist movement, are now in common use and have even been approved as
the official logo for Cornish tourist sites. Such recent ‘banal flagging’ (Billig 1995)
might suggest that this explicitly Cornish symbol, formerly confined to the Cornish
cultural revival, is becoming more embedded in local culture.

Conclusions

This article has argued that the marginal work on Cornwall has suffered from over-
rigid categorization, failing to perceive the details of the Cornish case and
succumbing to easy stereotypes. Instead, the comparative history of Cornish

19
nationalism reveals a paradox – a sustained ethnoregionalist movement that is unable
to achieve electoral or policy success. How far has an opportunity structure approach
helped to unlock this paradox? The timing, the claims and the low level of
institutionalisation of Cornish political nationalism in the wider political system can
all be partly understood by a comparative analysis of its external and internal
resources available to it. In particular, the electoral system plus the internal factors of
strength of party organisation, media coverage and voters have not allowed MK to
connect a sense of difference to wider grievances based on either territory or ethnicity.
As an ‘ethnic entrepreneur’ it has not succeeded and in consequence has become
marooned in an electoral void, able to maintain itself in existence but unable to
sustain a credible competitive challenge to the three mainstream political parties.

However, analysis needs to re-focus on a broader scale in order to explain both why
the Cornish identity does not unproblematically translate into support for regional
nationalism and why the internal resources available to it are comparatively limited.
Here, a historical institutionalist approach that moves beyond the territory of Cornwall
to the constraints posed by attitudes of the central state, Cornwall’s institutionalisation
into a wider government region and the consequent poverty of local civil society is
essential in order to take us further. This provides another crucial limiting factor
constraining Cornish nationalism through structuring ways of imagining Cornish
identity which in this discourse becomes a local as opposed to a regional (or national)
identity. By expanding our focus not just towards a different scale but away from the
political and onto social and cultural terrains, we discover additional constraints on
Cornish nationalism. Notably, Cornwall’s administrative history as part of England
and the large-scale demographic changes of recent generations combine to produce an
imagining of Englishness within Cornwall. On an individual level this might co-exist
with identities of Cornishness. But, at certain times in certain contexts, it can act as a
competitive imagining, providing another pole of action for resentments and
insecurities.

It is not, therefore, some absolute ‘weakness’ of cultural identity that underlies MK’s
limited electoral success but the way that identity is imagined and the context of that
imagination. Indeed, the argument here has been that there is no simple or automatic
link between strength of identity and political ethnoregionalism. The more crucial

20
factor in Cornwall is the way the territorial identity competes with other national
identities and the ambiguous political meanings it carries for people. To investigate
this further requires a lower level of analysis, focusing on the micro-sociology of the
Cornish identity and the way it is utilised in routine social practices, with comparative
analysis to show why, in some places and in some contexts, ethnoregional identities
are transformed into successful political movements and in other places they are not.
The Breton case, where Rogers (1996: 551) concludes that ‘ethnic consciousness may
not always be displayed through allegiance to highly visible nationalist organisations
but by means of other indicators … [participants] may have no specific political
project at all’ suggests that Cornish ethnoregionalism is not unique.

Cultural hybridity goes a considerable way to explain the relative weakness of

Cornish nationalism and its marginal institutionalisation in the political system.
However, it does not explain the fact of its existence in the first place nor its
persistence in the face of considerable structural constraints. The cultural resources
bequeathed to contemporary Cornwall by its ‘Celtic’ history and language can clearly
still resonate sufficiently powerfully to propel people into supporting and working for
Cornish ethnoregional movements. This might suggest there is a resilient core to the
Cornish identity that imagines itself as distinctive enough to demand forms of
separate treatment, whether political or cultural, from the central state. Active at a
relatively low degree when compared with Scotland or Wales, this core nevertheless
sustains the Cornish ethnoregionalist movement at a certain level of activity.

There is no reason to assume that this movement will disappear, having struggled to
carve out a small, but distinct, niche for itself. But will it change to reflect what some
observers see as a growing multiplicity of identities? Cornish ethnoregionalism may
be at a turning point. As in the Isle of Man, there seems to be a process of cultural
renewal under way as ‘creative reselection’ produces a new set of symbols around
which ‘cultural performances’ can take place (Hale 2002). Ethnicity is open to
negotiation and Cornishness may be becoming more of ‘an idea, a set of values, a way
of relating to place and to each other’ than a fixed, essentialist ethnic identification
(Lewis 2002). It remains to be seen whether the hints of creative cultural re-selection
can manufacture a more inclusive nationalism able to appeal to both insiders and
incomers.

21
The possibility that Cornwall may accompany the Isle of Man or Brittany into a ‘post-
ethnic’ future (Timm ????) raises questions about the salience of ethnicity in a future
Cornwall. Echoes of this may be heard in attempts by the Cornish Constitutional
Convention to build a feeling of belonging to Cornwall as a ‘region’, subverting the
official discourse of regionalism in England. Simultaneously, others are re-
emphasising Cornish ethnicity, in the process attempting to draw firmer historical
boundaries between ‘Cornwall’ and ‘England’ (Angarrack 2002). Such contrasting
initiatives reinforce the impression of a Cornish hybridity, one in the process of
constant change and renegotiation. However, if a sense of cultural renewal is to be
attached to projects of civic autonomy then the current Cornish institutional vacuum
provides perhaps the most critical constraint for Cornish ethnoregionalism. In the
absence of an institutional context feelings of insecurity may overwhelm cultural
renewal and produce a permanently marginalized illiberal nationalism in Cornwall,
and one, moreover, that comes in two varieties, Cornish and English.

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